


The Waiting

by weepingwillow



Series: Merlin Memory Month Fics [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 05:59:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10781016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingwillow/pseuds/weepingwillow
Summary: The waiting, he thinks, the waiting is what makes immortal life so hard. He could be happy with a purpose - the world is beautiful, truly, and he would be content if only he could have a part in it. Watching it, waiting for something he can't time, he can't predict; it's no life.





	The Waiting

People make of our story what they want to. They tell it to someone else, and it changes in the telling. That is the way of stories, and I think I know now, that this is all we will ever be.

 

There was a time, a long time ago, when I weaved a spell to keep my love alive. He was bleeding, he'd been betrayed and sliced open, and he'd been dying. I know he held on as long as he could, but it had been too late, the last breath of life leaving him as we reached Avalon. I had screamed, I had cried in my anguish, but I had not managed to save him.

 

I did the next best thing, though. I gave him to someone who could. Someone I had once cared for and who, for the love of me, would spend years on years stitching him together.

 

I asked her to wake him when the time was right. And I settled in to wait. Decades passed, adding up to centuries.

 

It's been so long now that I can't trust that I remember the real story. I believe parts of what people have written about us. Sometimes I even believe that I was an old man beside him and his youth and his beauty and my loneliness are what made me see love. Sometimes I believe that he is dead. But I have nothing else to do but wait. My magic is worn down to fitful sparks.

 

I miss him with all my heart.

 

\---

 

Merlin doesn't know what to do with it once it's written down. It's not as if there is anyone out there any more who would understand. But he aches with having acknowledged the pain, and he knows that to return to any sort of calm he will have to rid himself of the words. It's like some sort of catharsis, he thinks, to feel the agony, take it from himself and to settle again, afterwards. He wonders how many times he has done this before.

 

He decides that he will go down to the lakeshore. He finds a glass bottle in his recycling, clean and dry, and he slips his paper inside, stoppers it up with an old bit of cork. He takes stale bread for the ducks and spends his morning tossing crumbs to the birds.

 

The waiting, he thinks, the waiting is what makes immortal life so hard. He could be happy with a purpose - the world is beautiful, truly, and he would be content if only he could have a part in it. Watching it, waiting for something he can't time, he can't predict; it's no life.

 

He hurls the bottle into the air and he watches the arc of it, watches the glass flash in the light at the height of its curve… And then it dives, down, into the water, where Merlin longs to lie.

 

He thinks, it's supposed to bob. It's supposed to float. But it doesn't - ripples spread out from the point where it hit the water and he watches so closely there but nothing, nothing at all, breaches the surface. But it couldn't be magic, surely. Too much time has passed, and if even his own sinks into nothingness then he hates to think what is happening to Freya’s.

 

Nothing. He almost turns away, and he feels no satisfaction at all in knowing he was right. It's over. His love, his King, is dead.

 

And then the slightest of splashes. A change in the pattern of the water against the bank.

 

Merlin watches the spot where he last saw the bottle. He's suddenly very aware of how he looks. He hasn't shaved in years and he's let himself turn old, uninteresting, unsuspected. He's wearing battered old clothes, and he wishes he could change, wishes he could be something else. He dares to take his eyes off the surface for just a moment, and his pupils flash. His hair is dark again, his skin smooth, but he still wears his beard. Huffing at his own incompetency he looks up again, and he forgets everything.

 

The surface of the water is rippling and bubbling like it's boiling now, stronger and faster until a shape protrudes from the surface. It rises, slowly, so slow Merlin doesn't know whether to hope or not-

 

And then he's running through water up to his waist, laughing, crying, arms out in front of him to touch and to hold because it's Arthur, just as when Merlin saw him last except his hair is plastered to his head and stained dark by the water, and he's  _ alive. _

 

He takes Arthur by the shoulders, squeezing his mail hard to assure himself that it's real, not just a dream he'll wake up disappointed from in the morning. Arthur gives him a long-suffering smile.

  
“Oh, Merlin,” he says softly, “All you had to do was ask.”


End file.
